Monsoon Leopards on a City's Edge

A leopard reserve inside Jaipur city limits, drives through wet rocky scrub, and a Shikra in mid-flight against monsoon cloud.

Jhalana is the kind of place that does not, on paper, sound real: a leopard reserve, twenty-three square kilometres of rocky scrub forest, ringed on every side by a city of four million people. You drive out from the Hawa Mahal with the morning's first vehicles, you hit the gate ten minutes later, and you are in another country — a hot, scratchy, ancient one, with leopards in it.

The monsoon difference

August is not, conventionally, a leopard month. The grass is high; the cats are well-fed and largely invisible; the heat builds slowly until a thunderstorm shoulders in around three. But monsoon Jhalana has its own gifts — the scrub is suddenly, almost shockingly green, the rocks streak black with rain, and the light, when the cloud breaks, is staggering.

The shikra in flight

We did not, on this trip, get the leopard photograph. We got close — a flash of rosettes through wet branches, twice; a fresh pug-mark in the mud beside a sambhar wallow; a long, theatrical alarm call from a peacock, three minutes after which nothing happened. But on the second drive, returning to the gate under a sky still bruised from rain, a Shikra burst out of a babul and crossed the track in front of us at perhaps fifteen feet — and one frame, by sheer luck, came back sharp.

A monsoon morning, on its own terms

Jhalana, like most short-drive reserves, rewards repeat visits. Three drives in dry October will, statistically, give you a leopard. Three drives in wet August will give you wet rock, an enormous lightning storm rolling in from the south, and the small consoling thrill of knowing that the leopards are out there — invisible to you, but watching.

Sometimes the trip you remember longest is the one without the headline photograph.

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